Book 7 looks at Bob Dylan's return to his musical roots as a catalyst to a decade of creative rebirth. Live performance had gotten stale for Dylan, and he had strongly considered retiring altogether while on an eighteen-month tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. "My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn't have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn't penetrate the surfaces," Dylan recalled in Chronicles. "There was a hollow...